v1.1.2 / chapter 54 of 93 / 01 oct 09 / greg goebel / public domain
* The string of Union victories in the summer of 1863 was capped by the generally bloodless expulsion of the Confederacy from middle Tennessee. Not everything actually was going the Union's way that summer -- a Federal attack on the defenses of Charleston ended up a painful fiasco, and in protest to the Federal draft law rioters ran wild in the streets of New York -- but on the whole, the Confederacy now seemed on the road to irreversible decline. The only hope for Confederate survival was that the North would tire of the war in the face of stubborn Southern resistance.
* Following the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, President Lincoln was to receive more good news of success from middle Tennessee, though along with the satisfaction he got some frustration as well.
After Rosecrans' narrow brush with disaster at Stone's River, he had settled down in Murfreesboro to rest and refit his army, a task he did with a vengeance. He accumulated great stockpiles of every item needed for battle and in his single-minded way continuously harassed the War Department for more. As the spring wore on, the War Department in turn harassed Rosecrans to take to the field. He replied at length, stubbornly stalling for time. Rosecrans was inventive in thinking up strategic reasons for not moving, for example suggesting that if he advanced on Bragg, Bragg would simply withdraw and combine his forces with Johnston's to fall on Grant and relieve Vicksburg. Rosecrans also cited what he claimed was a rule of war, that a nation should not try to fight two decisive battles at once. The normally imperturbable Grant, only too familiar with Rosecrans' eccentricities, was incredulous when he heard that story.
The procrastination was not entirely Rosecrans' responsibility. In early
June, Rosecrans' chief of staff, Brigadier General James A. Garfield, drew up
a plan to begin an offensive. All of the other generals under Rosecrans'
command disapproved of an advance and the plan was cancelled. In the
meantime, the troops of the Union Army of the Cumberland grew bored and
listless, "rusting away" as one of them put it. On 16 June, Halleck
telegraphed Rosecrans, demanding to know if he intended to move and
indicating that the answers could only be YES or NO. Rosecrans asked for
five days, but 21 June came and Rosecrans was still motionless. Finally, on
24 June, just as Lincoln was about ready to explode, Rosecrans sent a
telegram to the War Department:
THE ARMY BEGINS TO MOVE AT 3 O'CLOCK THIS MORNING.
W.S. ROSECRANS, MAJOR GENERAL.
Not counting garrisons left behind, Rosecrans had 65,000 men available for
his offensive. Braxton Bragg had about 46,000 men to face this force, but
the terrain was rugged and clearly favored the defense.
Most of Bragg's force was positioned north of the Duck River, with two divisions under Polk and two under Hardee. Confederate cavalry under Forrest and Wheeler provided screens east and west of the these concentrations. Bragg had his headquarters and base of supplies in Tullahoma, south of the Duck River. He had taken advantage of the sitting war in middle Tennessee to refit and drill his army, as well as improve his defenses. In principle, he had reason to feel confident; in practice, his normally sour disposition had been made worse by a bad case of boils, and his relationship with his senior generals had never been worse. He regarded them as inept and they returned the compliment. There was something in Braxton Bragg that bred failure, even when things otherwise might be thought to be going well.
Rosecrans, for all his slowness in getting started, was energetic once he got into motion. He chose to avoid direct confrontation with Bragg's Confederates, sending out columns as feints and maneuvering to outflank the rebels. This plan was seriously threatened at the outset when rain fell out of the sky in floods on the advancing Federals. The rain was unseasonably heavy and continued for two weeks. However, the movement did not turn into another "Mud March".
The Union soldiers were encouraged at the outset by the initiative of Colonel John T. Wilder and his brigade of 1,500 cavalrymen. Wilder had been forced to surrender to Bragg the previous September at Munfordville, Kentucky. Although he had been paroled, the incident was humiliating and Wilder had a score to settle with the rebels. The men in his brigade were actually infantry who had been pressed into service as a mounted force, but they were just as determined as their boss, and were also armed with new Spencer seven-shot repeater carbines. Wilder had paid for the carbines out of his own pocket, with his men signing up to reimburse him out of their pay, though the Army eventually provided the funds to buy the weapons. Wilder, who had run an iron foundry in other times, was no military professional, but he was strong-willed and had a certain resourcefulness. Lacking sabres for his cavalrymen, he equipped them with long-handled hatchets. Wilder's men were mockingly known as the "Hatchet Brigade", and later some of them would admit they had been entirely green, with barely any concept of feeding or currying their horses. Events would still prove that if they were amateurs at horse soldiering, they had a talent for it.
The Confederate defenses were based on ridges running across the line of march of Rosecrans' army. To penetrate that defense, Rosecrans needed to seize a pass through those ridges. The most crucial one was Hoover's Gap. Wilder's men charged through the gap and rove the rebels off. The horsemen managed to get to the south end of the pass, and, backed up by four artillery pieces, held off counterattacks before Pap Thomas arrived with his troops that evening. The Yankees' Spencer carbines poured such a volume of fire on the Confederates that the rebels thought they were up against a much larger force.
Thomas was elated by this bold action, shaking Wilder's hand and announcing: "You have saved the lives of a thousand men by your gallant conduct today. I didn't expect to get this gap for three days." Wilder took about 61 casualties holding Hoover's Gap, compared to 146 casualties for the rebels, and had opened the gates to the Confederate defense north of the Duck River. Soon his men exchanged their nickname of the "Hatchet Brigade" for a new one, the "Lightning Brigade".
The rebels conducted counterattacks the next day, 25 June, but on learning that Federal troops were outflanking the Confederate divisions on the fighting line, Bragg ordered a withdrawal to Tullahoma. Polk and Hardee had their divisions in the defenses by the late afternoon of the 28th.
Tullahoma was strongly fortified and Bragg hoped to make a stand there. However, Rosecrans had no interest in throwing his men against earthworks. After pausing to resupply on the 27 June, he continued his advance on the 28th, directing the line of march to the southeast of Tullahoma, striking for the Nashville & Chattanooga rail line, which kept Bragg's army supplied.
By the evening of the 28th, Bragg was uncertain about what to do. Polk advised retreat, though Hardee was more hopeful that they could hold their ground. Bragg decided to sleep on it. He didn't get better news the next day. Wilder's cavalry had moved deep into his rear and had cut two branch rail lines, though they failed to cut the main line. Tullahoma was in danger of being isolated and surrounded. On the night of 30 June, Bragg gave the order to pull out and fall back below the Elk River, just north of the Alabama border.
The withdrawal was conducted professionally. Bragg had time to remove all his equipment, while Forrest and his cavalry conducted rear-guard actions. By 3 July, Forrest's troopers, having held the Yankees back until Bragg's army was safe south of the Elk, fell back themselves. A local woman shrieked at Forrest: "You great big cowardly rascal! Why don't you turn and fight like a man instead of running like a cur? I wish old Forrest was here. He'd make you fight!" Forrest was not easily intimidated, but he would later say he would have preferred to face an enemy battery than that one angry woman.
Bragg was beyond seeing any humor in the situation. "Yes, I am utterly broken down," he admitted, and said: "This is a great disaster." His troops continued their retreat into northern Alabama and then across the swollen Tennessee River, where they would be safe from immediate pursuit. He had saved his army but lost middle Tennessee. He took a train to Chattanooga so he could report to Richmond, to add one more great disaster to the several others that had just been inflicted on the Confederacy.
Rosecrans moved his army into the evacuated Confederate works at Tullahoma. He had lost only about 570 men and taken more than 1,630 prisoners. Many of the prisoners were Tennessee men; with the Federal conquest of their state, they had no more enthusiasm for fighting for the Confederacy. In contrast Rosecrans' men, though wet, tired, and muddy, were enthusiastic about their relatively bloodless victory. Rosecrans himself went back to accumulating supplies and preparing his next move. This time, he didn't intend to wait so long. Chattanooga was a prime target and he was determined to take it.
Washington was still unhappy that he stopped at all. The Confederacy had
been dealt severe blows in the first week of July, and it seemed entirely
possible to Lincoln and his people that if the pressure were kept up, the
rebellion might be ended in a matter of months. Secretary of War Stanton
needled Rosecrans in a telegram:
YOU AND YOUR NOBLE ARMY NOW HAVE THE CHANCE
TO GIVE THE FINISHING BLOW TO THE REBELLION.
WILL YOU NEGLECT THE CHANCE?
Rosecrans felt with good reason that the prod was unjust after the
significant gains his army had obtained for the Union. His reply had a
pained tone:
I BEG IN BEHALF OF THIS ARMY THAT THE WAR
DEPARTMENT MAY NOT OVERLOOK SO GREAT AN EVENT
BECAUSE IT IS NOT WRITTEN IN LETTERS OF BLOOD.
The letters of blood would be written in the near future.
* In early June, as Rosecrans was preparing his movement south in central Tennessee, back up the Department of the Ohio Burnside was assembling forces for an offensive of his own, into the hill country of east Tennessee. His specific objective was the liberation of Knoxville. The Unionist citizens of that region had long been waiting for liberation from Confederate authority, and that goal was near and dear to Lincoln's heart.
Burnside had been delayed by detachment of some of his troops to help in the fight for Vicksburg. He brought garrison troops from places like Cincinnati as replacements, but these men were green and needed training before they would be ready for offensive operations.
Whatever other deficiencies Burnside might have had as a general, he was not lacking in aggressiveness, and on 14 June he sent a column of 1,500 cavalry and mounted infantry under Colonel William P. Sanders into east Tennessee to scout out the region and disrupt the Confederates there. Sanders and his men returned on 23 June, having had considerable success in all their objectives. Sanders reported that the friendliness of the locals was a great help.
Encouraged, Burnside wanted to move quickly, but then events took an unexpected turn. John Hunt Morgan showed up in the Federal rear, leading 2,500 cavalry on a wide-ranging raid. Morgan had proposed this raid before Rosecrans began his offensive and Bragg had agreed, since it promised to disrupt Rosecrans' lines of communications and supply. Morgan was enthusiastic enough to even suggest that he and his men go north of the Ohio, but Bragg turned him down, since he wanted Morgan to be available if and when Rosecrans decided to move.
Morgan had no intention of obeying. He had enjoyed no great and glorious successes in recent months, and he felt that the only way to seriously disrupt Federal plans was to take bold actions. Morgan and his troopers crossed the Cumberland into the heart of Kentucky on 2 July 1863, slipping past a barrier of 10,000 Union soldiers. His command included four of his brothers and a brother-in-law. After attacking Union outposts with mixed results and losing one of his brothers in a fight, Morgan and his raiders crossed the Ohio on 8 July, using a pair of stolen steamers. They then rode a zigzag course east across Ohio, raising consternation and alarm all around.
Morgan succeeded in disrupting Federal plans for an offensive into east Tennessee, which at least made Bragg's withdrawal from Tullahoma much less complicated, and also succeeded in stirring up a troublesome hornet's nest. Homegrown militias were no great threat, but even in clashes with such weak foes, Morgan took casualties he couldn't afford. They also slowed him down while stronger Union forces converged on him.
By mid-July, Morgan and his men were exhausted and desperate to escape south across the Ohio. When they tried to ford the river on 18 July, they discovered it was swollen by the heavy rains that had drenched the region, and found a few hundred Union troops blocking their way. Morgan decided to wait until the next morning to attack, but when the sun came up it turned out that the outnumbered Federal infantry had quietly and sensibly pulled out. This didn't give him much relief, since he was then attacked by 5,000 Union cavalry backed up by a gunboat. Morgan lost about half his command, most of them captured, and led the rest off in a near-rout. About 300 of the survivors managed to ford the river that afternoon, but as a proper leader Morgan did not wish to cross until all his men had gone over to safety.
The Yankees pounced on him again before he could get everyone across, and Morgan and the handful of men he still had left were finally chased down and forced to surrender on 26 July, only about 50 miles (80 kilometers) away from Pittsburgh. The captives were taken back to Cincinnati. Burnside announced that Morgan and his senior officers were ineligible for parole. Acting on false reports that Abel Streight had been sent to a criminal prison after his surrender in Alabama, the Ohio state authorities ordered them confined in the state penitentiary. There they were dressed in convict clothes, and much to their outrage their beards and hair were shaved off. Eventually the governor of Ohio apologized for this last action, saying it was a bureaucratic mixup, but that did little to ease their indignation.
Although Morgan had inconvenienced Burnside, loss of almost the entire raiding party was a stiff price to pay. The raid had also done much to dampen antiwar sympathy north of the Ohio. While Morgan had hoped that Copperheads would come to his aid, even the most extreme among them had not dared to take such a step, and many who had been wavering in their loyalty to the Union cause found their resolve stiffened by the threat, real or imaginary, Morgan had posed to their communities.
* After the severe beating taken by the Union Navy in its naval attack on Charleston's defenses back in April, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles had been inclined to write off the effort to take the city. However, the failure still gnawed at him, and he resolved to try it again. After all, although the Navy had been driven off without doing the rebels much damage, the Federals had lost few men and only one ship, the KEOKUK, that had been of marginal value to begin with. The other ships had been quickly repaired.
Welles believed a more aggressive commander might be the key, and so Rear Admiral Andrew Foote was assigned to replace Rear Admiral Du Pont. Unfortunately, Foote had never really recovered from the wound he had taken at Fort Donelson, and he died in New York in early June. Welles then settled on Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren.
Dahlgren was head of the Bureau of Ordnance. He had developed the big Dahlgren guns that provided the heavy punch for the Navy's ships. He was bright and ambitious, though Welles feared too ambitious, and he had no combat experience. Welles decided to chance it anyway. On 6 July 1863, Dahlgren became commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron and the siege of Charleston.
Instead of going it alone this time, the Navy planned to work closely with the Army in reducing Charleston. In command of the 15,000-man Army contingent was Brigadier General Quincy Gillmore, who had only arrived himself three weeks earlier. Gillmore, an expert in fortifications and siegecraft, was called in to provide a strategy for breaking Charleston's defenses. His belief was that reducing Fort Sumter was the key, and that once Fort Sumter had been neutralized the Union Navy could simply steam into Charleston Harbor and demand the city's surrender.
To reduce Fort Sumter, the Union Army needed to mount siege guns on Morris Island, to the south of the fort. Morris Island was held by the Confederates. They had two strongpoints there, one named Battery Gregg that faced Sumter and helped control the channel between them, and another named Fort Wagner that faced south to defend against a Yankee land attack. Battery Gregg was a pre-war fortification, while Fort Wagner was something more advanced: an earthwork fort that looked from the ground like little more than some hills of sand that actually concealed well-protected bombproofs. Cannon fire had little effect on Fort Wagner, generally doing little more than churning up the sand. A bout of shoveling during the night easily repaired most of the damage.
Gillmore quietly built up a force of 3,000 men on Folly Island, just to the south of Morris Island. The two islands were separated by a narrow channel. On 10 July, Gillmore, now a major general, launched an attack at daybreak that took the rebels completely by surprise. By noon, he had taken three-quarters of the 4 mile (6.4 kilometer) island while only suffering casualties.
Encouraged, Gillmore launched an assault on Fort Wagner the next morning. The results were less impressive. The attackers were driven off with 339 casualties, including 49 killed outright. The garrison of Fort Wagner was barely scratched. Gillmore recognized that taking Fort Wagner was not going to be easy, and spent a week bringing up 41 guns and another 3,500 men. At noon on 18 July, the Union guns opened fire in an intense barrage, supported by Dahlgren's ironclads. The bombardment lasted for seven hours, driving rebel gunners from their positions. One Union soldier commented that enough metal had been thrown at Fort Wagner to establish "several first-class iron foundries."
When the guns went silent that evening, 6,000 Federals under the command of Brigadier General George C. Strong moved quickly forward toward Fort Wagner. In the lead was the 54th Massachusetts, a regiment of free blacks, the first black Union unit to be raised in the North. Among the 54th Massachusetts' soldiers were two sons of Frederick Douglass. At their head was 26-year-old Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, son of a prominent Boston family. Shaw had specifically volunteered the 54th to spearhead the attack as a way to prove his men's fighting spirit.
Shaw and his black troops gave all the proof anyone could ask for, at a terrible cost. Once the Union guns fell silent, the Confederates came out of their bombproofs. The Federal soldiers were massed together on the narrow strip of land in front of Fort Wagner and there was no way the rebels could miss, blasting through the ranks of the attackers with rifle and cannon fire. Colonel Shaw managed to make it to the parapet of Fort Wagner, where he was shot through the heart and killed instantly, his black orderly dying at his side as well. A 23-year-old black private named William Carney was shot twice himself, but managed to wrap the American flag around himself and struggle with it back to safety. For this feat, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the first black American to receive the medal. The 54th Massachusetts had achieved honor but little else, losing almost half of its men.
A second wave followed them in, leading to confused fighting and Union men firing on each other. The colonel at the front of the second wave was killed. Some of the survivors managed to hang onto Fort Wagner's parapet until morning, but were then forced to surrender. General Strong, who had been wounded by shrapnel in the leg during the assault, died two weeks later.
The Confederates buried Colonel Shaw in a mass grave along with his men. The Federals lost 1,515 of their number, many hideously mangled and dismembered by point-blank artillery fire. The Confederates lost only 174 men. Gillmore now realized the futility of a frontal attack. He settled down for a long, grinding siege.
A Federal party approached the Confederates under a flag of truce to ask for Colonel Shaw's body. The Confederate commander is said to have replied: "We have buried him with his niggers." Later Colonel Shaw's father wrote General Gillmore to ask that no special effort be made to recover the young man's body: "We can imagine no holier place than that in which he is, among his brave and devoted followers, nor wish for him better company."
* There was an awkward postscript to the battle. About 80 black troops had been taken prisoner at Fort Wagner, and under Confederate law they had to be tried in state courts under the charge of "instigating slave rebellion". The penalty for being found guilty on this charge was hanging for a slave, and enslavement for a freedman. Four ex-slaves among the prisoners went on trial in September, and it seemed likely at first that they would end up at the end of a rope.
However, in a turnabout play of the issue of captured Confederate privateers earlier in the war, Lincoln made it clear that if any Union prisoner were hanged, a Confederate prisoner would be hanged in retaliation; if any Union prisoner was put into slavery, a Confederate prisoner would be put to hard labor. Under pressure, the South Carolina state court judged it had no jurisdiction over the four men, and the captured black soldiers became prisoners of war. That legal precedent would stand for the rest of the conflict, for all the good it did: Confederate troops were often inclined to simply shoot black Union soldiers who tried to surrender and not bother with taking them prisoner. Black troops in combat often had to be restrained by their officers from killing Confederate prisoners in turn.
* Although Lee's men were not in any condition for the moment to seriously cause any trouble for the Army of the Potomac, Meade's soldiers quickly found themselves in another battle, this time against Northern civilians.
The clumsy conscription law passed by the US Congress in March led to demonstrations and mob actions against the draft all across the North, but the real explosion occurred in New York City in mid-July. Resentment against the draft, along with bigotry against the blacks who were regarded as the cause of all the trouble and potential competitors of New York City's Irish at the bottom of the labor market, led to a mob attack on the local draft office on Monday, 13 July. The draft office was sacked and the mob moved on to loot an armory and various businesses. The police were overwhelmed and the mob took over. Blacks were chased down and hanged from lampposts; a colored orphanage was burned down while the crowd cheered. The mob ran wild over most of the East Side for all of Tuesday and most of Wednesday. Catholic archbishop John Hughes and his priests went out on the streets to talk sense into the mobs, and were able to persuade some of the rioters to go home.
Much more persuasively, that Wednesday evening Union troops, sent by Meade to suppress the disturbance, arrived by train. These soldiers had faced Lee's "lean and hungry wolves", and bands of armed rabble were almost beneath contempt. Without delay, the Union men applied some of their well-tuned fighting skills. The entirely outclassed mob was scattered and crushed after a short, bloody fight.
A sullen peace descended over the city. Nobody ever came up with a good count of the number of civilians killed; the figure ranged from a few hundred to more than 1,000, making it one of the bloodiest riots in American history. There was a silver lining to the riots. The gallantry of the 54th Massachusetts in the assault on Fort Wagner had made headlines in the Northern press, giving many Northerners a new and different perspective on black folk. The heroism of the 54th Massachusetts was made all the more vivid by the tales of white mobs in New York murdering black people at random and burning down an orphanage.
There were contests for the governor's house in a number of states in progress at the time, and the Democrats were playing the old racism card. President Lincoln realized better than they that this card didn't carry as much weight as it had, and in late August he issued a letter to skewer them with their own ideology, the letter concluding that once the war was over "there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it."
The message went over well with the voting public. The public was also no longer as impressed by the fear-mongering of the Democrats over freeing of slaves. Many understood perfectly well the President's tactic of attacking slavery as a war measure: destroying slavery meant putting down the secessionists once and for all. Every slave turned into a free man, better yet a US Army soldier, would bring the Confederacy one step closer to defeat.
* The successive blows that the South had been dealt at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and middle Tennessee at the beginning of July 1863 did not completely destroy Confederate morale, but they badly frayed a unity that had not been strong in the first place.
Early reports in Southern newspapers of the fighting at Gettysburg had spoken of a great Confederate victory, but as more reliable news arrived the reports shifted to gloom and defeat. Robert E. Lee was himself not entirely displeased with the campaign. If he had intended to win the war for the Confederacy at a single stroke, he had failed, but though he had set this as a hopeful goal, it wasn't his only purpose in the campaign. He had successfully sidetracked the Army of the Potomac from offensive campaigns that summer and got the Federals out of Northern Virginia. Had he not moved, the Confederacy might have been even worse off.
The papers were not interested in balanced reasoning. All the generals involved in the defeats, including Pemberton, Bragg, and even Lee, came in for their share of bitter criticism, but the worst abuse was reserved the Confederacy's proud and inflexible president, Jefferson Davis. Old fire-eater Edmund Ruffin called him an "imbecile", and one particularly windy critic called him a "miserable, stupid, one-eyed, dyspeptic, arrogant tyrant."
Underlying the criticisms was the Southern distaste for central authority. Some critics, such as North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, disapproved of specific actions taken by Richmond, such as the suspension of habeas corpus. Others, such as Georgia governor Joe E. Brown, detested any central authority on principle. Brown had been referred to by a Georgia newspaper as "Joseph the Governor of all the Georgias", and he had little patience with attempts by the Confederate government to give him orders. He bitterly resisted conscription of Georgia citizens into the Confederate army, and in general acted to undermine the war effort.
In this, he had the support of Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens, who spent most of his time in Georgia. Stephens barely hesitated to attack the government of which he was formally a member. Stephens said: "Away with the idea of getting independence first, and looking after liberty afterwards. Our liberties, once lost, may be lost forever." Fire-eating Robert Toombs, who had resigned his commission in the CSA after Antietam and gone back to politics, chimed in as well, calling Davis "false and hypocritical", blasting the government's financial policy, requisition of private goods, and conscription, and saying that Davis's policy would "overthrow the revolution in six months."
The fact that the Confederacy was under an immediate, deadly threat from a ruthless adversary meant little to these "impossibilists". The contradictions of such thinking were particularly striking in Stephens, since he had more immediate evidence than anyone of the inflexibility of the enemy. That June, Stephens had sent a request to Jefferson Davis, asking that he be allowed to go North and discuss humanitarian issues with the Lincoln Administration. Stephens' secret agenda was to put out peace feelers, and he hoped his long-standing friendship with Abraham Lincoln would at least merit him a hearing. Davis did not particularly want a critic of his administration to represent the Confederacy at peace talks, but he felt the war was becoming increasingly barbaric and thought such a mission would be useful. Besides, Lee was on the offensive into the North, and having a diplomatic connection in Washington would be useful if the Confederacy won a major victory.
Davis summoned Stephens to Richmond, and sent him on his mission after being careful to specify that Stephens' authority was strictly limited to humanitarian concerns. Stephens departed on a truce steamer down the James on 3 July, and arrived at Hampton Roads the next morning, where he forwarded his request for discussions through the local Federal naval commander.
Stephens sat on the steamer in the July heat for two days, only to receive a
wire from Secretary of War Stanton on 6 July that read:
THE REQUEST IS INADMISSIBLE. THE CUSTOMARY AGENTS ARE
ADEQUATE FOR ALL NEEDFUL MILITARY COMMUNICATIONS AND
CONFERENCE BETWEEN UNITED STATES FORCES AND THE INSURGENTS.
Stephens went back to Richmond to hear the bad news rolling in. Lincoln had
no reason to consider peace talks, since he had good reason to believe that
the Confederacy was just about ready to collapse anyway.
* The loud criticisms of newspapers against the Confederate government and Davis were not new. Editorials were usually tiresome lists of complaints with little pretense of being constructive, and although the newspapers railed about the abusive powers of the government, they published any and all information without the least regard for secrecy or security. No Confederate official made any real attempt to silence them. With the setbacks of July 1863, the critics became even more strident and defeatist.
The decay of the value of the Confederate dollar was interesting evidence of the decline of public optimism. Up to April 1863, the Confederate dollar had declined from parity with a gold dollar to a quarter of that value. This was not too troublesome, since the Yankee greenback had declined to a third of a gold dollar during that same period. From that time on, however, the fall of the Confederate dollar accelerated, and by July it was only worth a ninth of a gold dollar. It continued to drop.
Everything was too expensive, when it was available at all. Jefferson Davis had received a personal lesson in how discouraged citizens were on 2 April when a mob of women, some of them armed with revolvers and knives, ransacked bakeries and other shops. Davis showed up with a militia company, stood up on a wagon, threw what money he had to the mob, and tried to appeal to their patriotism. This being ignored, he said: "I will give you five minutes to disperse. Otherwise you will be fired on." He stood there coolly looking at his pocket watch. The crowd didn't seem willing to disperse until Davis said: "My friends, you have one minute left." The mob evaporated before the minute was up.
This was an extraordinary incident and nothing exactly so preposterous would happen again for the rest of the war. Following the unrest, Confederate authorities did what they could to try to get food to starving citizens, though there would never be enough food to go around. The number of Southerners with Unionist sympathies would continue to increase, though they would always be a small minority outside the hill country. They still did what they could to sow discontent with the Confederate government.
With Lee's brilliant victory at Chancellorsville, the chances for foreign recognition of the Confederacy had seemed good. The Southern representatives in London, James Mason, and in Paris, John Slidell, felt they were making progress towards obtaining such a declaration from their hosts. There were certainly Confederate partisans among the governing classes of Britain and France. In fact, at the end of June Southern advocates in the British parliament brought up a motion suggesting that Britain open discussions with other foreign powers on Confederate recognition.
However, support for the motion was weak, and it was withdrawn in mid-July. The withdrawal was soon followed by the arrival of news of the rebel defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and there was no prospect that any new motion would soon be forthcoming. In August, Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin would write a formal letter to Mason, suggesting that he served no further purpose in England and should depart. Mason had very little problem with this suggestion, and quickly left England to join Slidell in Paris. In October, Jefferson Davis would order all British consuls out of the Confederacy since he had realized they served no useful purpose.
In Paris, Mason found that Slidell seemed to be in an excellent position. Slidell, a Louisianan who spoke French fluently, had considerable access to Napoleon III, and the French Emperor appeared sympathetic to the Confederate cause. However, sympathy was all it was. Napoleon III was not going to intervene on behalf of the Confederacy without the British, and the obvious fact was that the British were not going to do any such thing. Slidell felt he was being strung along, complaining to his boss, Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin, that he was tired of all the "double dealing".
All in all, there was little to give hope to the defenders of the Southern cause that summer. At the end of July, Chief of Ordnance Josiah Gorgas wrote in his diary: "The Confederacy totters to its destruction."
